Der Todt und das Madchen
(Death and the Maiden)
By Simon Njami
for Yassine
The Khalid Shoman Foundation - Darat al Funun is pursuing
its ongoing project to give a platform to contemporary Arab art
through the young Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. The works
displayed, videos, paintings and drawings are all driven by the
same flow, the same creative inspiration. Drawings and paintings
are directly related to the films of which they are the
matrixes. As for the three films, they have an autonomous life,
since they were conceived separately under different
circumstances. Nevertheless, the particular way in which they
are shown at Darat, suddenly had to their screening a new
dimension that would not necessarily have been perceived
otherwise: they belong to the same story, like a trilogy to
which the performance The Room acts as a subtle
link. To have the opportunity to watch those four moments of
creation gathered in the same space, immediately drove me back
to the famous Franz Schubert’s string quartet, Death
and the Maiden (Der Todt und das Madchen).
Inspired by a poem by Mathias Claudius, this composition stages
the breathless battle fought by a young girl against the lethal
end. In the poem, on which Schubert will first compose a lied (a
song) in 1817, a dialogue is instituted between the virgin and
the Hades Kingdom ambassador. Ambiguous dialogue where, at
times, one is tempted to wonder if the kid is not finally
welcoming what she fears and fights:
Leave. O leave
Far from me, cruel skeleton
Still young I am, leave me alone
Do not touch me, dear Death
Death plays its great loving seductress part, in the same
way than in Wolfgang Goethe’s Earl Koenig, where
she tries to trap a young ill boy in her cold arms.
The display at Darat al Funun stages a drama, in the
theatrical sense of it, organized around several acts. The
narrative chronology is not, here, what matters, but the general
feeling that fuses from the installation. The spaces hosting the
exhibition are used at their best. Paradoxically, we end our
physical journey through Amal Kenawi’s show by the first
movement of this trilogy: Frozen Memory, initially
the first of the three films. Frozen Memory, as
the title underlines it, tells us about memory and loss. About
time and its volatile remains, vanishing in the dark water of
memory. If memory is frozen, in the etymological sense, it may
melt and dilute, dissolve. In this film, Kenawy is probably
wearing the same white dress that we shall retrieve in her
performance, The Room. White symbolizes a certain
lightness, a certain purity. And even though the episodes of the
past fade away, the present and maybe a certain future remain.
This lightness of being, that the Czech writer Milan Kundera
once judged unbearable is illustrated by the main character who
seems at times to fly in spaces where there is no gravity,
through an empirical ballet where reality and imaginary are
confused, where souvenirs melt both in their own construction
and in their decomposition. First movement, we said, or rather
first moment. For if I stick to my parallel with Schubert’s
work, one will have to consider Frozen Memory as
the second movement andante con moto: which hosts the
inner space where nothing is completely decided. A space of
rebellion and refusal, that witnesses the still vivid appetite
for life of the young girl. Even though in the allegro
represented by The Room, we are given the central
motive of the drama at stake, Frozen Memory plunges us in
a quite nostalgia that puzzles us. The ending, here, is not
determined yet. And even though the confrontation with that
stubborn memory has a lethal taste, even if the performance ends
with the death of the broken hearted main character, nothing
prepares us the blind violence, the mental cacophony awaiting
us. The third movement of my reconstructed quartet will then be
The purple Artificial Forest.
If in Frozen Memory, the artist showed us some
concrete elements of a revised reality, in this scherzo
allegro molto, we enter the very realm of
illusions. Here, each element plays as a metaphor. And the
artist has no intention to hide her purpose, since everything is
contained in the title: we are entering an artificial world.
Nothing, therefore, in this unbearably violent moment is true.
The images running before our eyes are not what they claim to
be and we must look elsewhere, in ourselves, to grasp if not the
truth – a very controversial notion, but at least the echo that
is awakened in us. We are facing the heart of what the French
psychologist Henri Delacroix called: “the chaotic world of
sensations”. Pure language, undeciphered. We are immerged in a
raging and self-destructing unconscious. A dream, a nightmare in
which the screen seems to be drowning in a symphony of lavish
blood. A purple that would stage an open and ever bleeding
wound. "Hell is the others", said French philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre. No, replies Kenawy: we are all carrying our hells within
ourselves. And there is no way to escape. This kind of
resignation is made clear in the last moments of the film, where
quietness seems to take over. But we are aware that we should
not be fooled by this illusion of hope. The author could try to
mislead us but you already admitted that the young girl will not
survive this battle. Not in this world but in some paradise-like
place.
And suddenly, here is the presto of the fourth
movement: You will be Killed. Like
in Schubert’s piece, rhythm is obsess ional and leaves little
space to distance and reflection. We are not allowed to breathe.
In a infernal rondo-sonata, we are swift away by a crazy horse
on a shore and left exhausted. But contrary to Schubert, Amal
Kenawy states nothing. If in Schubert’s quartet the young girl
is finally taken by Charon, the keeper of the Deads gate, the
character materialized in Kenawi’s own face, in a hyperrealist
figuration, is not physically dead. The title of the piece, once
again, held a precious information by using the future: this is
a premonition. Not reality. It is a vision, a projection in
time, as if it were the continuation of the Purple Forest’s
nightmare. Like in a perfect crime, there is no murderer. He
fate is suggested to us in the same way than a divine statement.
A future that have already been written. And, at that very
moment, the echo of the allegro comes back and resounds in our
memory. As if The Room, after having opened way to doubt and
multiple endings was providing us with a possible solution. Like
in a final act, all the contradictions fall into places.
Introduction and conclusion at the same time, The Room leads us
away from the materiality of a life that is no longer
incarnated. The young girl in a white dress, surrounded by all
those candles-nails is not dead. She is sleeping. And the dreams
that she is dreaming may be nothing but the journey we just have
gone through. Hen, we have to start all over again. Like in
those endless stories where the end is never the end and the
beginning never the beginning.
Simon Njami
Amman, January 27, 2007
Simon Njami is a freelance curator and art critic from
Cameroon; he lives in Paris, France. Njmai is the chief art
director of the exhibition Africa Remix.
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